


Keeping the Same Time

by what_alchemy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, John Watson/Mary Morstan - Freeform, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 00:46:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1878645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When Sherlock Holmes brought Dr. John Watson, late of the Royal Army Medical Corps, back to life with a chase through London streets and some Indonesian takeaway, John put away, once and for all, any thoughts of finding the person whose name he wore beneath his left breast.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping the Same Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hitlikehammers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/gifts).



Mary had a ragged gouge where her heart seam should be.

It was old, the carving inexpert, the skin gone shiny and purple, but it was deep enough that John was sure he could lay the whole of his index finger inside. Sometimes, when they were lying naked and entangled in bed, he itched to see if he could, but he was careful never to skim his hands, his lips, anywhere near the scar. She, after all, had never asked about the name his own heart seam bore. It was the least he could do in return.

—

When Sherlock Holmes brought Dr. John Watson, late of the Royal Army Medical Corps, back to life with a chase through London streets and some Indonesian takeaway, John put away, once and for all, any thoughts of finding the person whose name he wore beneath his left breast. John was thirty-seven years old, and he was done with fairy stories.

Besides, how could anything this apocryphal _William_ might offer be brighter and more vibrant than life with Sherlock Holmes? He’d never met a William who wasn’t underwhelming, other than old Bill Murray. But Bill, good, solid, lovely Bill, had a heart seam that boasted a string of Chinese characters, and he said, “Sorry Johnny boy, guess I’m an old romantic.” He was waiting for her — Xua, he said her name was. He’d learned Mandarin and also Cantonese just in case. He’d joined the army to amass some savings so he could go to China and find her after his tour was up. John could respect it, even if he was a bit disappointed.

People were moving away from heart matches anyway. Common choice partnerships were on the rise, and if mainstream movies and romance novels were slow to catch up, the only result was an increase in international eye-rolling. Names on skin were an evolutionary throwback, like wisdom teeth or the appendix. Someday, the human race would be shut of them, and they could all go about their business unshackled by nonsense about _heart seams_. 

Whenever John looked at Sherlock, inevitably doing something ridiculous like puttering about in the kitchen wearing nothing but goggles and underpants as he wielded a blowtorch, John’s heart swelled, and he thought, _this is everything I’ll ever really need_.

That didn’t, of course, stop him from joining websites like Blank Slate, which was for people whose heart matches were dead or indisposed or otherwise unsuitable. John had _needs_ , and if Sherlock fulfilled most of them, there was one he seemed disinclined to entertain. John was young, and he had no intention of going about the rest of his life celibate and frustrated.

The arrangement worked fine for a long time. Women to cuddle and sniff and kiss and sink into, Sherlock to be thrilled and challenged by when he came home. John _liked_ this life he’d made for himself, and for two years he didn’t think on his fool heart seam at all. 

And then Sherlock Holmes, the man to whom John had devoted his life and affections and attentions, died.

—

He and Mary had had precisely one conversation about it, vague and elliptical in the first flush of their romance.

“My parents were a heart match,” Mary said, trying to smile. But it wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t funny. Her mouth twisted sourly. “Nothing about it was flowers and chocolates.”

John reached across the table to squeeze her hand. 

“Mine were a heart match, too,” he said. “But good luck finding functionality between a drunk and a gambler. Some people are doomed to self-destruct. It’s just a shame there’s so much collateral damage.”

“Have you ever met yours?”

John thought of Sherlock, whose heart seam he had never seen, never dared ask after. John thought of Sherlock, smiling lopsided on the sly when he thought John couldn’t see, or lolling about all over the furniture hoping to get John’s attention whilst pretending it was the last thing he wanted. John thought of Sherlock’s brilliance, and his grace, and how he fell like Icarus from on high. In the restaurant, on this date with someone safe and comforting, John sat back, took his hand away from hers, and sipped at his glass of wine to buy himself some time. How could he explain? There was no explaining Sherlock, and how little the name on John’s chest mattered once Sherlock entered his life.

“No,” he said after a moment. “You?”

Mary’s face tightened and she nodded once.

“It’s rubbish though, isn’t it?” she said. “You aren’t born with a destiny. Physiology and biology can neither tell nor dictate the future. It’s all just rubbish.”

“But it still hurts,” John said quietly. Mary dropped her gaze to her empty glass and reached for the bottle of wine to pour herself some more. 

“We hurt each other all the time,” she said. “It’s just that when a _heart match_ hurts us, we ascribe more meaning to it than we should. We act as if it’s some grand betrayal when really, it’s mundane. Run of the mill. Lovers hurt you, friends hurt you, your bloody parents hurt you. Heart matches — they’re just people the whole of history has told us have the capacity to hurt us worse than anyone else, so we let that be true. We can choose, John. We can choose the people in our lives. We can choose how hurt to be. And we can choose to stop letting accidents of melanin run our lives.”

John smiled at her, and if it hurt, he decided it was a cleansing kind of pain. 

“I agree completely,” he said. He reached back over the tabletop to take her small fingers in his. They fit just so.

—

Sherlock came back, and John was seized by anger, not happiness. In bed after he busted Sherlock’s face and careened away in a cab, Mary tucked herself against John’s back and slung her arm around his waist, her leg over his hip.

“Aren’t you just a little bit glad?” she said, lips mashed into the back of his neck.

“Nope.”

“You are.”

“I’m not!”

“So you wish he were dead.”

“That is not — that’s not what I said! Don’t put words in my mouth!”

“You love him.”

John went rigid in the tangle of Mary’s limbs, but she held fast.

“Shh,” she said. “It doesn’t bother me. I know you’re mine. It could never happen anyway, right? He’s not… built for it.”

“It’s shit,” John said, and shrugged her off him. “It’s utter shit.”

He turned out the light and scowled into the ensuing darkness.

“Men,” Mary muttered, and turned onto her other side.

John listened to her breathing, wakeful and short, long into the night.

—

Mary was right, of course, and soon enough John was back at crime scenes half a step behind the tosser in the coat. One day in the springtime, all Lestrade had to say was “serial murders” and Sherlock was at John’s door, making a nuisance of himself.

“All right, all right,” John shouted, glad to be so exasperated again. “I’m _coming_ , calm down.”

“A serial killer, John!”

“I heard you the first eight hundred times!”

When John came out of his flat, one of his neighbours looked at him the way one looks at a particularly foul pile of dog shit one has slid in, and John just glared back. 

“Come on, Sherlock,” he said, too loud. “Let’s go look at some dead bodies.”

The neighbour, a hag some twenty years older than John with a stick up her arse even older than that, scowled harder, but Sherlock was oblivious. He beamed and clapped his hands together.

“Isn’t this fun?” he said.

“Intoxicating,” John said, and then Sherlock was whirling around, a blur out the the door, and John was helpless but to follow.

Things at the crime scene, however, were decidedly less jovial.

“You didn’t say this was a _heart seam_ case, Lestrade!” Sherlock veritably howled. “You know I don’t do heart seam cases!”

Sherlock found heart seam cases dull in the extreme, and after taking a few in those first months of their partnership, John couldn’t help but to agree. People either wanted Sherlock to find their heart matches or they wanted to uncover their heart match’s inevitable infidelity or betrayal or whatever unforgivable sin they’d cooked up. They _were_ tedious, and it got so John could solve the cases in under ten minutes without any input from Sherlock but some facial acrobatics. They eventually had to post “NO HEART SEAM CASES” in big red letters across the tops of both Sherlock’s website and John’s. 

“Sherlock, it’s your favourite,” Lestrade said, waving his hands at the body on the lino. “All the victims share nothing but a first name, and we’re consulting the databases now for every Caucasian male under fifty whose heart seam says ‘Elizabeth,’ but that’s a tall order, innit? I know you can help us out before this bloody well happens again, I don’t care how boring you think heart seams are.”

“People shouldn’t name their children such dull, common things!”

“Sherlock,” John said, resolutely not wondering what poor arsehole got to have _that_ scrawled over his heart. “Calm down.”

“You calm down!”

With that, Sherlock dropped to his knees and began sniffing the victim, a Dr. Elizabeth Hafiz, whose tea had sloshed over her carpet when the intruder burst into her flat. John stood back, one arm crossed over his stomach, his other elbow propped on his wrist so he could rest his knuckles against his lips as he watched Sherlock work. Lestrade came up beside him, and they both watched as if compelled.

“He can never resist a serial killer,” Lestrade said. John grunted in agreement. “Never did get his aversion to heart seams, though.”

Finally John rocked back on his heels to regard him, brows drawn together.

“Him?” he said, pointing at Sherlock’s bouncing bum. “You’re surprised _that bloke right there_ is confounded and irritated by one of the lodestones of the human condition? Have you gone round the bend?”

Lestrade raised his hands in surrender, mouth quirking in his particular crooked smile.

“Just think it’d be nice, don’t I?” he said. “If there was someone out there, just for him. So he wouldn’t be so…”

“So what?”

“Alone,” Lestrade said. John had to look away and swallow all the saliva that had gathered in his mouth. “I thought for a second, when you were first on the scene… but I was wrong. I dunno, guess I’m just an idealist, even after—” He waved his hand around at the blood spattered across the flat. “—everything.”

John ground his teeth together and shoved his hands in his pockets, eyes firmly back on Sherlock, who was now inspecting Dr. Hafiz’s toenails. 

“I think you’ll find we all make our own destiny,” John said.

—

The killer, it transpired, was not a man whose heart seam read “Elizabeth,” but a man whose _girlfriend’s_ heart seam read “Elizabeth.” Sherlock tracked him to a house in Wandsworth, John incapacitated him, and the whole cab ride back to Baker Street, Sherlock ranted about heart seams. John was tired of it — not just the case, which Sherlock had not stopped complaining about since the moment they arrived at the scene of the crime, but of the entire business of heart seams, and being mismatched, and having it all be empty anyway.

“What’s your bloody story then?” John snapped. “Got your heart broken? Heart match wanted somebody else? Or are you one of those creepy punters without a heart seam at all?”

Sherlock’s mouth clicked shut and he blinked at John rapidly. John scowled and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Michael is the most common male name in English-speaking countries,” Sherlock said eventually. “Followed closely by John,” he gestured at John, “Christopher, David, Robert, and James. How do you suppose one goes about finding a needle in a haystack?”

“With a magnet,” John bit out. Sherlock’s face went stony, and John immediately regretted it.

“Superstitious pap anyway,” Sherlock said, turning away to look out the window as London rolled past. “There’s no such thing as unconditional love, or one person who will cure you of all your ills. The names are a biological fluke, constantly misinterpreted through the lenses of various institutionalised cultural biases. Even you’ve given up the entire idea of finding ‘one perfect person,’ if Mary’s anything to go by.”

John bristled. “What’s Mary got to do with it?” he said. “She could be my heart match, you don’t know.”

Sherlock snorted, and John saw his breath fog the window.

“Obvious,” Sherlock scoffed. “You’re both settling, or you think you are. I, for one, commend you for what appears to be the first sensible thing you’ve ever done in your life. More people should settle.”

John ground his teeth so hard he thought he might lose them. He knocked on the window and asked the cab driver to let him off right here. The cab drove off, and John refused to check whether or not Sherlock glanced behind him as it diminished into the distance.

—

Love was a real thing, John knew. It was measurable in the hormones and chemicals of the body. And beyond the physical, it was a choice people made, and could continue to keep making, or not. Love not only nourished, but required nourishment. This was where most relationships failed: people believed grand declarations or simply the appearance of matching heart seams stood in for the work of being a good partner.

Maybe heart seams were just a trick of the pigment. Societies without written language gave rise to people with unique marks beneath their pectorals, and excavations of pre-historical humanity showed similar stamps of individuality. The presence of heart seams was a basic condition of being human. But perhaps not every society assigned the burden of love to the names on their heart seams. Perhaps not every society placed such weight on love in the first place, until it was an anchor rather than an illumination. 

All John knew was that he ached and ached, and he had never done so over anyone named “William.” He didn’t believe in heart seams, but he did believe in love. Even if the best and wisest man he knew didn’t.

—

Mary shot Sherlock and all of John’s carefully built philosophies on choice and caring crumbled. He returned to Baker Street with a single suitcase in hand. The first night back, he asked Sherlock, who was being so careful and treating him with such uncharacteristic tact, about what really happened with his heart seam.

Sherlock looked at him for a long time, knees propped up on his elbows, hands a steeple before his face.

“Nothing happened,” he said. “Mismatch, or I didn’t find the right one, or something. But it doesn’t matter what my damned chest says. I made my choices a long time ago, and I am — content with them. I’m glad you’re here, John.”

John sent him a tired smile, and Sherlock smiled back. 

“Should I read the flash drive?” John asked. “Should I forgive her?”

Sherlock sat back into his chair, still ginger from his wound. He gazed off into the empty fireplace. 

“You should grab at happiness, John,” he said. “If either of those things will help you do that, then… yes.” 

He lurched to his feet, and John sprung up to help him. Sherlock waved him off and staggered into his bedroom.

“Good night,” John called at his back. “Call me if you need help.”

He got no answer.

—

John’s world kept imploding. He wasn’t sure he’d survive it all. First Sherlock killed Magnussen to ensure John and his family’s safety, then he was being whisked off to an assignment for Mycroft that would take God only knew how long, then he was declaring that his full name was _William Sherlock Scott Holmes_ as if each syllable weren’t a bomb going off in John’s brain.

Sherlock got on the plane and flew the fuck away, while John’s wife, Mary, carrying his child, slid in against his side and looped her arm through his.

“You all right?” she asked. He stared up into the sky and didn’t even open his mouth for fear of what would escape. Mycroft strolled up on his other side and joined him in watching Sherlock’s plane grow smaller and smaller. 

“I was the first to hold him, after he was born,” Mycroft said, and John was horrified to find his eyes prickling with wet heat. “He was a bit premature, but he had the lungs of an angry Tory and loads of hair. It never fell out, either. I’m given to understand most newborns lose the hair they’re born with. Curious.”

“Mycroft.” John’s voice was raw. 

“I made a promise that day, John,” Mycroft said. “And I intend to keep it.” With that, Mycroft spun on his heel and strode toward his favourite black car. Minutes later, Sherlock’s plane had landed once again and he bounded off it, grinning like all the serial killers in London had decided to strike in one day. John could have sworn his heart and stomach flopped about so thoroughly at the sight of him that they switched places altogether.

John gripped Mary’s hand more tightly, and nothing became clearer.

—

In the days that followed, Mary grew more and more drawn, but John hardly noticed. He was busy chasing the spectre of Moriarty around London with Sherlock. He felt, once again, resurrected.

“Tell me you don’t miss this,” Sherlock said as John slammed the butt of his Browning into the back of yet another henchman’s skull. John, panting hard, turned around to find Sherlock so close their noses might collide if Sherlock were to take a deep breath. John licked his lips. “Tell me you’d rather be in the suburbs playing happy families with a woman you’ve never really known.”

“I thought you liked Mary,” John said.

“I’ve always liked a good criminal genius,” Sherlock said. “Call it one of my few personal failings.” He leaned down, mouth falling open even as his eyes slowly shut.

“Sherlock,” John said, choking on the name. “I can’t.”

Sherlock froze, eyes snapping open.

“I made vows,” John went on. “I made a commitment. I made a choice.”

Sherlock wheeled backward. “And Mary?”

“What?”

“Is she as steadfast as you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sherlock swept past him and walked too quickly for John to keep up without jogging.

“Come along, John,” he said stridently. “There’ll be more rats’ nests.”

—

John told himself, when he caught a glimpse of his heart seam in the mirror the next night, that he still didn’t know what Sherlock’s heart seam said. It could say Mohammad, or Somchai, or bloody Bob for all he knew. John’s own damned heart seam could mean the same nothing it had always meant.

Mary’s ponderous body emerged in the loo’s door jamb. He watched her eyes roam down his chest in the mirror before settling on his heart seam. He resisted the urge to cover it.

“What’s all this then?” she asked. The way her jaw clenched and the skin around her eyes pinched belied the lightness of her tone.

He wanted to tell her. That he’d found his heart match, that it was who he’d always wanted it to be, and that it was the same chain she’d always said it was, only it felt less like imprisonment and more like union. But he stilled his tongue. He remembered, in rank, vivid detail, finding Sherlock near death with Mary’s own bullet lodged inside him. He remembered that he’d married a woman who wasn’t so much sorry for what she’d done as sorry for having got caught. And he remembered that he’d made a promise to love her anyway. He could choose unconditional love. He could be more than a pop culture cliche. 

He forced himself to smile at her in the mirror.

“Nothing,” he said. “Thinking of getting a tattoo, actually.” 

Mary came up behind him, and the belly was an obstacle but not enough of one. She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around him, covered his heart seam with her hand. Beneath her palm, John’s pulse thundered.

—

Moriarty went down in a hail of MI6 bullets, and there was no ambiguity this time. When it was done, John pulled Sherlock, shaking, from the carnage, wrapped him in a blanket, and rubbed his back up and down while all of Mycroft’s little soldiers bustled around them. John told himself he was allowed this closeness, and when Sherlock sagged against him and began to fall asleep, John cast Mary from his mind altogether.

—

He came home late to find Mary at the sink washing dishes. It was suddenly awkward, as if he were a stranger who’d walked into someone else’s flat.

“It’s done,” he said into the gulf between them. “He’s gone, really this time.” She stilled, and when she finally looked up at him, her face seemed hollow despite the fullness of the pregnancy, and her eyes went bright and glassy. 

“Good,” she whispered, but her voice cracked. She dropped her chin and focused on the dishes again. “That’s good.”

The back of John’s neck felt as if it were a wick set on fire. He went as still and calm as he ever had in combat.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She heaved in a deep breath and let it out unevenly. John took a step closer, and another, and another, slowly until he was close enough to lay a hand on her back, but he didn’t dare.

“Have you ever loved someone you wished you didn’t?” she said. “Have you ever wished you could stop, because the person you love is the very ruin of you? But you can’t stop, because no matter how hard you try, or how far you run, or how well you pretend, there’s something terrible inside you that keeps on wanting.” John’s innards went cold. “Of course you have,” she went on, as if talking only to herself. “Of course you have.”

“What are you saying?”

“You should go, John.”

“Mary.”

“You should go be with — with William, now. It’s the proper thing.”

John’s breath quickened, and he had to wet his lips.

“I married _you_ ,” he said, and she let out a bitter, rocky laugh. She turned around and wiped her wet hands on the legs of her trousers before meeting John’s eyes. Hers held tears that refused to fall.

“Listen, John,” she said. “I’m no good. We both know it, and we’ve both done a bang-up job pretending it’s not true so you can sleep through the night. But this is a good thing I can do. Just one good thing. Will you please let me have this? Before I change my mind and kill everyone you love instead.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Assassins make murder jokes, John, do keep up.”

John squeezed his hands into fists, shifted his weight from foot to foot, licked his lips again.

“The baby?” he asked. She raised an eyebrow and a shoulder.

“Fifty-fifty chance it’s yours or… well. We’ll do a blood test.”

“I — I’d like to be her father, regardless.”

Mary laughed again, and now a tear or two did slip out. She shook her head.

“John Watson,” she said, and she sounded about as admiring as she did mocking. “Noble to the very end.”

“Joint custody and multiple families — it’s practically how everyone’s doing it these days,” John said. 

Mary slanted a fond look at him and flicked him with a wet dish rag.

“Get out of here,” she said. “Go make sure Himself isn’t playing in traffic or something.”

“I love you,” John said.

“No you don’t,” Mary said. “But thanks for trying.”

—

Climbing the stairs to 221b, John could hear the sorrowful strains of Sherlock playing the violin. It was a piece John had never heard before, something mournful and soft. He opened the door and there Sherlock was, clad in a burgundy dressing gown and cutting a graceful silhouette against the window. John’s heart felt too big for his chest. He said Sherlock’s name, and Sherlock startled, whipped around, said his name back.

John crossed the room and stepped in close, tilting his head up even as Sherlock tilted his down to look him in the face as if he were a miracle. 

“John,” he said again, the word a puff of air against John’s lips.

John carefully set a hand on Sherlock’s bare chest, moving the silk of the dressing gown to the side until it slipped down Sherlock’s shoulder. Sherlock flushed a mottled pink from the tips of his ears to the points of his nipples, and there — there, curving beneath his left pectoral was John’s name, blushing along with the rest of him.

“Did you know?” John asked, soft. 

“What? Did I know what?”

“That your name was on my heart seam. Your bloody stupid, common, _dull_ first name.”

Sherlock swallowed audibly, and he blinked down at John as if he were a computer in the throes of a glitch.

“No,” he said after a while.

“Why did you never say anything? At least — at least about this?” John swiped his thumb along Sherlock’s heart seam, and he shivered. John’s blood began a steady southerly pump.

“Do you know how many Johns there are in the world?” Sherlock said. “Do you know how many I’ve met? How many I’ve hated? How many I’ve — I’ve tried to—” He cut himself off and sealed his mouth shut. 

John took his hands off Sherlock with great reluctance, but he did it so he could unbutton his shirt as Sherlock watched, mesmerised. He wrested the violin and bow from Sherlock’s grip and set them in their case. He took Sherlock’s hand and placed it over his heart, where the raised lines of his heart seam surely seared into Sherlock’s palm.

“Heart seams are stupid,” John said.

“Yes,” Sherlock said.

“Meaningless.”

“Of course.”

“There are probably a million Williams with Johns on their skin and vice versa.”

“Too true.”

“We’ll never know for sure.”

“Shame.”

“Kiss me.”

“God, yes.” 

Sherlock’s mouth was lush and sweet, and if he was a bit clumsy, a bit unpractised, John didn’t mind. Chest to chest, seam to seam, their hearts kept the same time. 

 

**End**

**Author's Note:**

> [Translation to Chinese](http://www.movietvslash.com/thread-143122-1-1.html) now available thanks to Frettchen!


End file.
